Apache Tika Documentation
| This reference guide was generated with the assistance of AI and requires human review before it can be fully trusted. This documentation serves as an example and a starting point, but more work remains. Contributions and corrections are welcome. |
The Apache Tika toolkit detects and extracts metadata and text from over a thousand different file types (such as PPT, XLS, and PDF). All of these file types can be parsed through a single interface, making Tika useful for search engine indexing, content analysis, translation, and much more. Tika identifies a file’s type from its bytes, so a missing or misleading extension does not change the result.
Where to start
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Using Tika — choose an integration method: Java API, command line, REST server, or gRPC.
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Pipes — process-isolated, fault-tolerant extraction at scale.
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Configuration — the JSON config file: parsers, detectors, metadata filters.
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Setting Limits and Robustness — bounding time, memory and output when parsing content you do not control.
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Security — the trust model, and what to lock down before exposing tika-server or tika-grpc.
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Migrating to 4.x — what changed since 3.x and what you have to update.
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FAQ — the questions upgraders ask most.
Apache Tika is an Apache Software Foundation project, formerly a subproject of Apache Lucene.
Built from commit: 81f2eb01d6 (2026-08-21)